Women’s sexuality is dangerous because it can lead men astray or can influence them to pursue self-destructive acts. This idea is evident in William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Tower”. The power of women’s sexuality is shown through the association of light and women’s beauty and the effect of light can have on the sight of people, while the sublime functions to note the overbearing dread caused by women.
Yeats describes a “peasant girl” whose beauty is well-known in the area and has inspired men to go looking for her; these men have “declared it right” to have “sight” of the woman, where the rhyme functions to link right with sight. The word “right” carries an implication of morality and justice; therefore, through the rhyme scheme, having …show more content…
Specifically, Yeats refers to the beautiful girl as “Helen” who similarly “had all living hearts betrayed.” In this instance, Helen’s sexual power lead to Paris kidnapping her causing the start of the Trojan War, which ultimately ended with the complete destruction of the Trojan Empire. For Yeats, beautiful women attracted violence; the women in his life, such as Maud Gonne and Lady Gregory, were heavily politically engaged. Subsequently, Maud Gonne, Yeats’s muse and love, was “passionately immersed in the political liberation of Ireland … that Yeats is obliged to express his anxiety over her indulgence in Irish politics” (Chang 54). Helen of Troy is “a woman who in Yeats's mind was not an ideal of beauty, but a symbol of beauty's unconscious power: perfectly beautiful, but perfectly unthinking, and so potentially destructive” (Hynes 568). Through this comparison, Maud Gonne has been “transformed and mythologized into a figure of female sexual energy” (567). In fact, Yeats labels the story of the Iliad and the Odyssey as a “tragedy” due to the misfortune and suffering that was produced by Helen’s sexuality. Likewise, later in the poem, Yeats alludes to Helen’s mother, Leda, stating the “swan must fix his eye.” This is referring to Zeus who, disguised as a swan, rapes Leda, leading to the birth of Helen; the story of Leda and the Swan has often been portrayed with violent and erotic overtones. Similarly, the sexual temptation embodied by a woman, Leda, lead to dire consequences that were unforeseen by Zeus due to his lust. Both these stories involve specifically seductive Greek women that cause the downfall of